STOKELY CARMICHAEL

Stokely Carmichael was born June 29, 1941 in Port of Spain, Trinidad adn Toabago. This parents then moved to New York while he stayed with his grandmother. Soon however, he moved to New York and lived with his parents. He grew up in the Bronx of New York. Growing up in the Bronx, he bacame the only black member of the Morris Parks Dukes gang.

In high school he attended a non-segregated school where he was popular with both races. Later he talked about his high school expirence saying, "Now that I realize how phony they all were, how I hate myself for it. Being liberal was an intellectual game with these cats. They were still white, and I was black.'' Towards the end of high school Carmichael began enriched with the idea of protesting segragation. He said, "When I first heard about the Negroes sitting in at lunch counters down South,I thought they were just a bunch of publicity hounds. But one night when I saw those young kids on TV, getting back up on the lunch counter stools after being knocked off them, sugar in their eyes, ketchup in their hair—well, something happened to me. Suddenly I was burning.'' Then he later joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). After high school, Stokely Carmichael recived various scholarship oppertunities and attended Howard University in Washington D.C. From there he majored in philosophy. As a freshman in college Carmichael went on his first Freedom Ride,during that trip, he was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi for entering the "whites only" bus stop waiting room and jailed for 49 days. After this he actively involved in the civil rights movement throughout his college years, participating in another Freedom Ride in Maryland, a demonstration in Georgia and a hospital workers' strike in New York. He graduated from Howard University with honors in 1964.

After his graduation, he became part of the SNCC. As part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee he devoted his time to campaign for black voters in the South to register. He soon became organizer for Lowndes County, Alabama. In Lowndes County he managed to raise the number of registered black votes from 70 to 2,600 in one year!

Carmichael became disappointed with the slow progress that the SNCC was making. Stokely Carmichael then founded his own group. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization. The logo was a Black Pather which later inspired the Black Panther group. He countinued to be in the SNCC and he continued to support the nonviolent actions that they were taking. By May of 1966 Stockley had lost faith in the nonviolent resistance. He no longer welcomed white members that had once been actively recruited in the SNCC. By June of 1966 Carmicheal proved that he was done with nonviolence saying: "We been saying 'freedom' for six years, What we are going to start saying now is 'Black Power.'" He later explained black power saying, ''It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.''

From his change in mind, he joined the Black Panther Party and continued to support 'Black Power'. Carmichael quit the Black Panthers in 1969 and left the United States and moved to Conakry, Guinea, where he dedicated his life to the cause of pan-African unity. "America does not belong to the blacks," he said, explaining his departure from the country. Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture to honor both the president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and the president of Guinea, Sékou Touré. Carmichael remained residence in Guinea where he later died. Carmichael was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1985. He died on November 15, 1998, at the age of 57.